Ryse was never native 1080p, ran at 900p even during E3

Ryse is the talk of town these days especially after the confirmation that Polygon count has been reduced for characters from 150k polygons to 85k polygons. As it turned out, this was done to optimize the game, giving extra overhead to pack more grunt resulting in implementation of enhanced shaders and real-time physics. It also resulted in the removal of LODs to provide a consistent quality of character models.

Crytek’s CEO Cevat Yerli latest tweet suggests that Ryse was 900p even at E3. It was always upscaled to native 1080p. In other words, there has never been any “downgrade” to Ryse.

Ryse was originally supposed to be running at native 1080p, confirmed by Digital Foundry at E3. It was later revealed by Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg that Ryse is actually running at native 900p. Since it was originally thought that it was native 1080p, this new info was regarded as a downgrade to the resolution.

Now that we have gotten the official word from Crytek’s CEO regarding the resolution, we can safely assume that Ryse was never downgraded. Infact, the recent Polygon reduction helped in adding more effects to the character models, resulting in better graphics along with improvement to the Lighting.

So how did it confuse even experts at Digital Foundry? We have no idea but we suspect it is due to Xbox One doing a good job at upscaling the image to native 1080p. Yerli himself calls the frame buffer as running at native 1080p with AA, after the upscaling. Digital Foundry might have mistook the upscaled native 1080p frame buffer as the internal rendering resolution of the game.